The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair
The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair
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Abstract
This is an academic book on women and body hair, a subject which has, until now, been seen as too trivial, ridiculous or revolting to write about. Even feminist writers or researchers on the body have found remarkably little to say about body hair, usually not mentioning it at all. If women's body hair is noted, it is either simply to accept its removal as an inevitable aspect of female beautification, or to argue against hair removal as a return to a ‘natural’ and un-oppressed female body. The only texts to elaborate on body hair are guides on how to remove it, medical texts on ‘hirsutism’ or fetishistic pornography on ‘hairy’ women. This book asks how and why any particular issue can become defined as ‘self-evidently’ too silly or too mad to write about. Using a wide range of thinking from gender theory, queer theory, critical and literary theory, history, art history, anthropology and psychology, the contributors argue that, in fact, body hair plays a central role in constructing masculinity and femininity, as well as sexual and cultural identities. Arguing from the theoretical position that identity and the body are culturally and historically constructed, the chapters each analyse, through a specific focus, how body hair underpins ideas of the ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’ in Western culture.
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Front Matter
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1
The last taboo: women, body hair and feminism
Karín Lesnik-Oberstein
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2
‘The wives of geniuses I have sat with’1: body hair, genius and modernity
Daniela Caselli
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3
A history of pubic hair, or reviewers’ responses to Terry Eagleton's After Theory
Louise Tondeur
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4
Hairs on the lens: female body hair on the screen1
Alice Macdonald
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5
‘La justice, c’est la femme à barbe!’: the bearded lady, displacement and recuperation in Apollinaire's Les Mamelles de Tirésias
Stephen Thomson
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6
‘That wonderful phænomenon’: female body hair and English literary tradition
Carolyn D. Williams
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7
Fur or hair: l’effroi et l’attirance of the wild-woman
Jacqueline Lazú
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8
Designers’ bodies: women and body hair in contemporary art and advertising
Laura Scuriatti
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9
Bikini fur and fur bikinis
Sue Walsh
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10
Women with beards in early modern Spain
Sherry Velasco
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11
On Frida Kahlo's moustache: a reading of Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair and its criticism
Neil Cocks
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End Matter
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